Nature Photography (Formally Spring is in the Air)

[Crackington]

 Wow, lovely pictures @ceratopsian. Haven't seen these geese before, are they visitors to UK? Would have thought it was a bit warmer in Egypt!

[ceratopsian]

@Crackington, I was oblivious to their existence till I met them on the golf course last year in lockdown. They are native to Africa. But there are feral populations widely dispersed, presumably descended from escapees from ornamental collections. So no, they don't migrate. They can swim and indeed we saw the babies swimming strongly yesterday, but the adults spend a lot of time grazing and wandering on land. They make a very peculiar hoarse quack/honk!  Two friends further out in Hertfordshire to whom I showed photos said they had a pair on their respective local ponds.

Edit: forget to add that there are ancient Egyptian wall paintings showing what must be the same birds. Maybe in the Ashmolean?  But a quick Google will bring up something!

[Crackington]

 That's amazing @ceratopsian, love the factoid about them being pictured in Egyptian art. I'll keep an eye out for them over my way.

By the way, I see the kites most days now - they were really close the other day, right over our square. Hope they make their way to you soon.

[ceratopsian]

@Crackington - I will keep looking for the red kites!

[Dusty Wren]

@ceratopsian, thank you, you solved a mystery for me. I took some photos of some beautiful geese at a farm show a few years back, and forgot to ask the owner what they were. Guess they were Egyptian geese!

Love those spotty little goslings, too.

[Halichoeres]

Great photos! Definitely not a species I'd expect to find in England. I suppose the winters there aren't too hard (compared to, say, an equivalent latitude in the US).

[ceratopsian]

Indeed our winters are not especially hard at all.  We tend to get a couple of cold snaps in the average year, but they don't usually last for very long, especially not this far south.  Yours is a much more extreme continental-type climate I think, both hotter in the summer and colder in the winter. I don't know the distribution of these geese and how far north they survive in the UK (e.g. up in Scotland).

Great photos! Definitely not a species I'd expect to find in England. I suppose the winters there aren't too hard (compared to, say, an equivalent latitude in the US).

[Newt]

My faithful Olympus TG-4 has died. In its honor, I would like to post some photos from our last outing together, to the Cumberland River Bicentennial Trail in Ashland City, Tennessee.


The trail is part of the Rails To Trails program, wherein abandoned sections of railroad grade are paved to make walking paths. There are several such trails in my area. This one runs parallel to the Cumberland River at the margin of its floodplain. To the north of the trail is a former river channel, now a swampy slough with abundant Black Willow and Buttonbush.





To the south is a series of steep slopes and bluffs carved into the limestone by some combination of the Cumberland in its wanderings and the railroad engineers. The slopes are blanketed with typical mixed hardwoods - oaks, hickories, maples, beeches, locusts, and so on. The bluffs are crowned with Eastern Redcedar and festooned with calciphilic plants, like the swathes of moss and sedum seen here.




At this time of year, both bluffs and slopes are decorated with wildflowers (for some reason, few wetland and aquatic plants bloom so early, so the swamps will not show out until late spring and summer). Here are some samples:



Dwarf Larfspur (Delphinium tricorne) with Spring Beauty (Claytonia virginica).






Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica)






Early Saxifrage (Micranthes virginiensis)





More later.

*EDIT* My pictures aren't showing for me. Can anyone else see them?

[Lanthanotus]

Can only see the first picture showing the wetlands.... looked at the your text, seems you did right with the code to show pictures, but there link addresses
seem rather long, maybe that has something to do with them not showing.

[Newt]

Hmmm. I deleted the image links and replaced them with the very same links, and now they work. I'm baffled. I think I have whatever the electronic equivalent of a black thumb would be.


False Garlic (Nothoscordum bivalve)





Eastern Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis)





Bulbous Bittercress (Cardamine bulbosus)





Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis)

[bucatini]

Spring peepers, American toads and wood frogs but still no chorus frogs (though I did hear some).













Can anyone spot the caddisfly larvae?

The first picture, wow! I would only go there if someone pay me a lot to do it. It looks like a scenery for a horror movie

[Mellow Stego]

@Newt Wow! That's a gorgeous location.

[Newt]

Thanks, @Mellow Stego ! It's one of my favorite places to walk. Great herping location too - lots of snakes hibernates in crevices in the limestone bluffs. The only herps I saw on this trip were an Eastern Cricket Frog (Acris crepitans), a couple of Little Brown Skinks (Scincella lateralis), and some basking emydid turtles (too far away to make out clearly, but at least some were too big to be anything but Cooters (Pseudemys concinna)). I also heard Cricket Frogs, Spring Peepers (Pseudacris crucifer), and Cope's Gray Treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis) calling. I think I was out too early for the snakes' emergence.

[Gwangi]

lol, I get what you're saying B @bucatini, but the creepy atmosphere for me is part of the appeal. At any rate, I feel safer out there in the swamp than in most cities.

[Halichoeres]

Sorry to hear about your camera, Newt!

Not so much on the close-ups, but this was the view of Lake Michigan from my window today. I love this town.

[ceratopsian]

What a wonderful open view!

[Halichoeres]

This was the same window about a month ago:


And about a month before that, a view of downtown from the lakeshore (ground level this time, I love walking in the snow).

[Newt]

Nice shots, and nice view, @Halichoeres !


I both love and dread snow. Here in Nashville, where light dustings are the rule, any significant snowfall is a traffic-stalling, utilities-disrupting calamity. We just aren't prepared for it. We had a few inches of snow and freezing rain in February; you would have thought the world was ending.

[Halichoeres]

Nice shots, and nice view, @Halichoeres !


I both love and dread snow. Here in Nashville, where light dustings are the rule, any significant snowfall is a traffic-stalling, utilities-disrupting calamity. We just aren't prepared for it. We had a few inches of snow and freezing rain in February; you would have thought the world was ending.

Thanks! Where I live is dense enough that I don't have to own a car or shovel anything, so I only get the upside of snow. I might feel different if I had to clear a long driveway of a foot of slush.

[ceratopsian]

I've found new places fairly locally to watch avian dinosaurs.  The rarer birds, like the nesting or displaying Great Crested Grebes, keep too far away for my modest camera.  But my new binoculars at least assist the viewing!

A Mallard drake with a rather mud-spattered neck preening at Stocker's Lake, Hertfordshire:



And two from Grovelands Park, Southgate (north London).  A male Mandarin:



And a Tufted Duck female: